


rendezvous

by waxrose



Category: Arashi (Band)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-31
Updated: 2018-08-31
Packaged: 2019-07-04 19:13:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15847596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waxrose/pseuds/waxrose
Summary: It’s amazing, really, how close they all came to passing each other by.





	rendezvous

**Author's Note:**

> For Nino Exchange 2018 - originally posted [here ](https://ninoexchange.dreamwidth.org/95402.html). Much love to [oviparous](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oviparous/pseuds/oviparous) for her excellent beta work. Title and lyrics below are from "Junction - Rendezvous" from the Untitled Live Tour DVD, translation from [@arashi_engtrans](https://twitter.com/arashi_engtrans).

_There must be_  
a timing for every rendezvous.  
Like gears mesh.  
Like points and points join to form lines intersecting with each other. 

This is how Nino wakes up every morning.

He is warm, warm all over, almost to the point of being uncomfortable, but the arm draped around him from behind and the hand splayed flat against his chest are anchoring sensations. He feels somehow – in the movement of those fingertips across his skin, in the dark hairs that tickle his cheek from the head tucked into the curve of his shoulder and neck – that it must be real. 

He lets his own hand stray out, in the dim early morning light, to the face he can see in front of him, the curves of cheeks and faint eye wrinkles that soften in sleep. He's memorized every line on that face, knows the slow rhythm of his breathing by heart.

Nino touches the edges of the lips that had, until now, been softly pouting in sleep, chapped and swollen under his touch. 

When he drinks his morning coffee every morning, seated cross-legged on the living room floor, he lets his mind wander to try to fill in the blanks, to put the pieces together. He is grateful for those sunrises, for the overwhelming sense of warmth that they give him, but he wants the nights, too. He longs for the nights.

But he never gets as much time as he wants.

Just like every morning, a pair of warm brown eyes slide slowly open, blinking before focusing on Nino. He can feel a slow smile under the fingers still lingering on the lips that are now mouthing near-silently the words he knows by heart.

_Good morning._

And like that, like every morning, Nino finally wakes up.

+

Nino would never call his life lonely - but Aiba would. Sho does, bluntly, but gently, on the rare occasions that he manages to drag Nino away from his games to come out for a drink or dinner. He's not a recluse; he has friends, he has his job at the real estate office, and he has his hobbies. His life is simple but satisfying. It's only his dreams that seem to disagree with him.

Like every morning, he drinks his coffee on his balcony, watching the sun peek over the grey edges of the horizon shyly. He was never an early riser, but he's been waking up like clockwork before dawn for a year now, and he can't ever seem to fall back asleep; his bed feels strangely cold after the overwhelming warmth of the dream.

Like always, he tries to sort through the half-remembered fuzziness, trying to find any differences or unexpected points. For the most part, the dream is static and unchanging, but if he tries to remember before wakefulness dissolves the reality of the moment like sugar in his coffee, he can sometimes find something strange, something that’s different. The seasons change: that was the first thing he noticed, passing in the form of heavier blankets tucked around him against a faint chill in the air, flannel pajamas where there was sometimes bare skin. This morning had been soaking hot, the height of summer. 

Nino frowns, sips his coffee. The trees in the park in front of his house are only beginning to bud. It's been an unusually cold April.

Waking up early like this allows him to linger on the moments and sensations that tend to slip away as the day goes on, the touch-memories of being held close, of warm skin close against his. Sometimes he catches himself thinking about it in the mundane, everyday moments of his day, and the tips of his ears burn bright red as he catches himself. For someone who used to be more of a night owl, he finds himself crawling into bed with a half-feverish excitement and dread against the possibility that, just as suddenly as they appeared, the dreams might disappear.

+

He regrets telling Aiba and Sho about the dreams, but he had been drunk, and before he had known it, he had started complaining about how he had probably caught a cold because someone else had been hogging all of the blankets, and the next thing he knew, they were smiling at him expectantly and (in Aiba's case, at least) wickedly. 

"I don't know who," was Nino's flat, and entirely truthful answer to the unspoken question. 

It had been a strange relief to be able to tell other people - at least, people who wouldn't judge him too much, and who were, oddly, more likely to believe his story that he dreamed every night about waking up in a strange bed. 

"Naked?" was Aiba's first, very insistent question, followed by, “Can you catch a cold from a dream? That doesn’t make sense.”

"What does the other person look like?" Sho pressed.

"The one I can see is...well, I don't know. How am I supposed to describe him? He has dark hair." And pudgy cheeks, and he wrinkled his forehead in his sleep, and was overall terribly cute. 

"What do you mean, _the one you can see_?" Sho demanded, entirely distracted from his earlier point.

"Nino," Aiba breathed, clearly impressed. "You really get around in your sleep."

+

Nino was entirely unprepared for meeting Ohno, and he didn’t exactly handle it well. 

He had been sitting peacefully at his desk, mentally planning out his gaming schedule for the evening while working on a listing for a condo opening further up the block ( _Newer windows! Plenty of shade_ ) when he heard a mumbled "excuse me" and looked up directly into a set of soft, warm brown eyes that he was entirely too familiar with.

"Uh," he said, words failing to spark in his mind, "Um." 

He was greeted with a soft, shy (if confused) smile. The part of Nino's brain that wasn't entirely hysterical catalogued it immediately as a _new smile_ , one he hadn't experienced before. "My name is Ohno - I'm here because I saw a listing in the window for a building in Ogikubo."

"Ogikubo," Nino echoed, gathering himself mentally. "Yes, uh, well. We have several apartments listed in that area. Would you like to have a seat?"

+

The meeting lasted about fifteen minutes, and when Ohno slouched off back through the door with a polite nod, Nino had to excuse himself to the bathroom to change his shirt, because he was pretty sure he had just sweated through it completely.

+

"So he's real?" Aiba asked, when Nino relayed his news over ramen and beer late after work had finished. He was a little too loud in his excitement, attracting some strange looks from other tables nearby. 

"Apparently so," Nino said. "He didn't seem to know me, though." That had been the only disappointing point of the whole encounter. Ohno had been polite, warm, but distant. 

Yet he was – without a doubt – the same person whom Nino had been dreaming about for months. And if Nino's dreams had been vivid technicolour, the actual encounter had been 4-D; the way Ohno's dark hair curled against his neck, a little too long. The tenor of his voice, his oddly baby-fresh scent, when he had bent close over the map Nino had shown him, the unconsciously elegant way he had folded an old receipt into an origami kite while Nino had explained different available listings in the area…

"Are you going to see him again?"

"I'm meeting him to show one of the apartments on Thursday." 

Aiba slurped a mouthful of noodles, drops of oily soup flying through the air. "This kind of feels like fate, doesn't it?" he asked through a mouthful of half-chewed noodles. 

As if struck by a bolt of lightning, he suddenly sat upright, pointing furiously at Nino.

"You mean you think the dreams were real?" Nino said. "Like a premonition?" 

Aiba nodded furiously, holding a hand over his mouth to prevent noodles from spilling out.

"If that's true, where's the other guy? He’s got to be out there somewhere, but I don’t even know what he looks like. " 

"This is so exciting," Aiba exclaimed. "It's like Pokemon Go!"

+

That night's dream was different.

"Nino." Ohno's voice was almost directly in his ear. "Kazu - look at us."

The room was dimly lit, with moonlight falling in stripes across the sheets between him and Ohno. Other things were different, too - the blankets were stripped completely away, and he was flat on his back, not curled up on his side as he usually was.

Ohno was hovering over him, smiling in a way that sent a shiver through Nino. "Were you sleeping?" he asked, voice lower than it had been when he had spoken to Nino at the office, "Were you dreaming?"

Nino tried to speak, but it was like his throat was closed, and it strained and almost hurt to try. 

From the angle he was lying at, he had a great view of Ohno straddling him – the powerful flex of his thighs branching either side of Nino's chest, the chiseled line of his stomach and abs – and his cock, dark and flush with arousal, standing up against his stomach. Ohno was dragging a hand lazily up and down his cock, rising slightly on his knees to keep his balance.

Nino was so overwhelmed with the sensation of Ohno's skin flame-hot against his, the weight of Ohno on him that it took a moment before he realized that there was another set of hands smoothing over his thighs and calves. He jumped slightly at the nip of teeth on the sensitive skin high inside his thigh, nearly displacing Ohno. He tried to speak, but only an undignified whine escaped him, and Ohno chuckled. 

"You'll need to stop making that noise, or he's going to keep biting you," Ohno advised. He ducked his head to scrape his teeth against Nino's collarbone, to lick at the sharp curve of bone and kiss the dip of his clavicle. With Ohno bent over, Nino could catch a glimpse of a head of dark hair and pale, broad shoulders behind him, but he couldn’t see clearly. He couldn’t _think_ clearly, with two sets of confident hands and warm lips taking him apart, with the hot brush of Ohno's cock against his chest as he licked and kissed his way up Nino's neck. The room was sweltering hot, and his hair was plastered wet to his forehead. 

"If you don't tell us what you want, I will bite," threatened a voice from behind Ohno, deeper, richer, accompanied by a loose, teasing fist around Nino's cock.

Ohno chuffed a little laugh that was entirely too cute given his position atop Nino. "You need to tell him. What do you want tonight?" He pinched teasingly at Nino's nipple, rubbing his thumb in slow circles over the hardened nub. "How do you want us?"

_How -_

+

For the first time in nearly six months, Nino woke up long after sunrise. 

"What the fuck," he breathed, wide-awake and ridiculously hard, close to panting. "What the actual -"

+

Nino was proud of himself for maintaining a professional manner when he found Ohno waiting outside the train station’s east exit on Thursday morning, and if his legs were a little wobbly, he could blame it on sitting cross-legged for too long while gaming the previous evening. 

It was surreal to be walking beside Ohno – standing next to him, he realized they were of a similar height. It was a ten-minute walk to the building he had planned to show Ohno, and he learned a lot as they walked – Ohno worked as a sushi chef, but his true passion was fishing. He had a charming manner of slipping off mid-sentence into a new train of thought, but Nino surprisingly didn’t find it hard to keep up.

“Oh.” Ohno stopped in front of a shop window, about a block away from their destination. Nino glanced at the sign – it was a bakery. The air smelled sweet and doughy, like cinnamon and chocolate.

“I love sweets,” Ohno said, almost by way of apology for the delay. “And bread.”

“Then you might have a problem if you move in down the street,” Nino said. 

“It seems like a good location,” Ohno mused, giving the bakery window one last glance. “It’s nearby?”

“One block away,” Nino replied.

+

The apartment was a little large for one person, but clean and well-kept. Nino followed Ohno from room to room, commenting as blandly as he could on the view from the windows and spacious cabinets. It was the bedroom that froze him in his tracks. 

There was something keenly familiar about that room.

Once Nino got a hold of himself, he noticed that Ohno seemed somewhat shaken, too – staring out at the empty space of the bedroom as if he expected something to be there, in the middle.

“Is it all right?” he asked, carefully watching the confusion on Ohno’s face.

Ohno looked at Nino as if seeing him for the first time. 

“I’m not sure,” Ohno admitted, sounding a little lost. 

+

“This is getting weird,” Sho said flatly, cracking open a beer and flopping on Nino’s couch. “So what, he moves in, and then what?”

“Then they get together,” Aiba persisted.

“How?” 

“Everything has been coming together so far, right? He found Ohno, the apartment – ”

“Yeah, but isn’t this going to require some sort of action at some point?”

“Can we talk about something else?” Nino requested from the floor, one arm slung across his eyes.

+

Nino’s dreams became increasingly feverish as summer heated up.

He opened his eyes to find Ohno already watching him, a slow, sleepy smile lighting up his face. There was a hand around Nino’s cock, stroking up and down slowly – more of an explorative teasing than an attempt to get him off – but it wasn’t Ohno’s hand.

A light kiss was pressed on his shoulder, in the crook of his neck. 

“You’re up early,” Nino croaked without thinking, and he instantly panicked, not knowing where that thought had come from. All he got in response, however, was a hoarse chuckle against his back. 

“Jun-kun is pretty useless before coffee, though,” Ohno commented. “He’ll probably just fall asleep again.”

Nino tried to twist around, to see properly, but he got pushed face-forward into the mattress for his trouble.

“I’ll show you useless,” the rough, deeper voice – Jun-kun? – said, and Nino could barely suppress a shiver before there was a tongue tracing hotly down his spine and hands roughly parting his legs open – 

+

Nino woke up face-first in his pillow, the late-morning sun full-on streaming through his blinds. 

“Auuuuuggh,” he said. “What happened?”

“So, Finding Number One,” Aiba said, unusually chipper for someone who had been keeping an all-night vigil with a clipboard, “You didn’t physically leave the room.”

“I let you watch me sleeping and that’s all you have to tell me?”

“I’m just getting started.” Aiba flipped a page on the clipboard. “At 4:15AM, you smiled in your sleep.”

“This was so useless,” Sho groaned from the foot of the bed. 

+

A year later, when Jun is finally Jun-kun, or J, or sometimes just Jun, but no longer Matsumoto-san, and Nino is sitting at the counter watching him work, Nino asks him when he knew.

“From the moment you walked in,” Jun says. “When you found me.”

It’s amazing, really, how close they all came to passing each other by.

+

The message from Ohno was waiting on his desk when he arrived at work.

_I’ve decided not to take the place. Thank you for all of your hard work and help._

The next morning, Nino woke up feeling somewhat lost.

He had only woken up once.

+

The dreams didn’t begin again, but Nino didn’t really feel himself give up until he learned that someone had leased the apartment. That’s when it all seemed final.

The universe was unkind enough to send him in place of his sick colleague to go have the client sign the final lease papers, so off he went to Ogikubo, walking the familiar path he had traversed with Ohno only a few weeks earlier. 

Nino was satisfied enough with his life. Perhaps he didn’t follow the threads fate wove out for him faithfully enough, or it’s possible he didn’t tug hard enough on the right string to get the pattern to fall into place. And yes, he missed Ohno’s sleepy smiles. He slightly regretted not getting the chance to see if his initial sparks of curiosity and attraction would have caught fire. But he was satisfied.

Nino walked past the bakery four times, nearly becoming late for the appointed time, until he realized that the address he had been looking for was right in front of him all along.

The door bell tinkled, clear and musical, as he opened the door, and although there was no one behind the counter, it was only a moment before a person emerged from a door in the back – a tall, broad-shouldered man with dark hair and stubborn-looking features. 

“Good afternoon,” Nino said, bowing politely. “I’ve come with the final lease agreement. Are you Matsumoto Jun?”

The man seemed caught aback somehow, staring at Nino.

Nino wondered for a moment if he might have the wrong address after all. 

+

Nino learns, over time, that even when fate seems to be on your side, love is slow.

It is three weeks before Jun calls him, on the pretense of asking a question about an extension of the lease.

It is a month later, of tentative café visits that started to be less about consultations and more about just having company, that Jun and Nino walk into a sushi restaurant that Jun’s friend had recommended, and Ohno is standing behind the counter. Something in Nino’s chest tightens as Ohno’s eyes widen in clear recognition as they settle on Jun before meeting Nino’s.

While they are eating, watching Ohno work behind the counter, Jun casually mentions that he is looking for a roommate. His new place is too large, too cold and empty, and a little expensive. 

Nino realizes, as Ohno bites his lip, unclear of how to respond, that perhaps, this was how it was all supposed to happen. 

The months pass, and seasons turn.

Nino knows that Jun frequents Ohno’s workplace at least once a week, waiting for him to finish work to invite him out for a drink. Nino stops by Jun’s bakery on the way to work to enjoy brown sugar milk buns and Jun’s charming morning surliness. Ohno visits Nino at work with no real purpose and seems to miss him half the time anyways if Nino’s out on a showing, but when Nino comes back to his desk to find a tiny folded paper bird, he knows.

+

There’s one particular memorable time, early on a grey Tuesday morning that Jun finally works up the nerve to press Nino back against the counter and steal a kiss, gentle and almost shy. It was so soft as to be almost dream-like, and Nino learns – as he had already imagined – that he could easily lose himself in Jun’s kisses.

It also leaves him with flour in his hair, unnoticed until one of his colleagues remarked that he was going grey.

Ohno and Nino’s first kiss comes within five minutes of Jun and Ohno’s, at 2:00AM while drinking in Jun’s living room in celebration of Ohno having moved in his five cardboard boxes and most comfortable sofa.

As hot as it is to watch Jun curl his hand around the back of Ohno’s neck and kiss him hard, moaning into his lips, Nino goes truly weak at the knees when Ohno breaks the kiss, looking around to Nino, a clear invitation in his eyes.

And when things drift from the sofa to the bedroom, it’s both new and exciting and entirely familiar. They have all been waiting for this, and it’s taken them this long to get here. But partly because of that, it’s entirely worth it.

+

Surprisingly, it’s Aiba who asks first.

“Did you have dreams, too?” he asks Ohno. The two of them are crowded around the low table in the living room with beer and edamame (it took months for Nino to stop thinking of it as _Jun’s_ place, or _Jun and Ohno’s place_ , and it really wasn’t until he moved all of his systems in that it felt properly like _their_ place) because Jun is doing some Serious Cooking in the kitchen, and everyone knew better than to intrude.

Nino’s used to multi-tasking his gaming and socializing, but he has to crane his head to actually look properly over at Ohno – who is still staring wordlessly down at the edamame he is shelling but blushing furiously. 

“We could make a timeline!” Aiba persists. “What each of you dreamt, when it happened, we – oww, Sho-chan, that was my foot.”

“Sorry,” Sho says peaceably, gathering a handful of edamame as he sits down on the floor. 

“Satoshi-kun, I think he might need someone to help taste the stew.” 

Ohno beats a retreat into the sanctuary of the kitchen so fast that Nino has to smother a grin in the collar of his sweater. 

He’s going to have to ask later. 

+

This is how Nino wakes up every morning.

He is warm, folded tightly in Jun’s arms, spooned back against Jun’s chest, feeling the rise-fall of Jun’s breathing. Ohno is barely an arm’s length away, preferring to not be crowded, but willing to let Nino snuggle into his warmth when Jun has to eventually peel himself out of bed, dropping a lazy kiss on Nino’s shoulder as he grumbles his way to the kitchen to make coffee and get ready for work as the orange light of sunrise begins to creep through the blinds. 

Nino scoots into Ohno’s space, tracing the fine lines around his eyes and mouth, until finally Ohno’s eyes open and slowly focus.

“Good morning,” Ohno croaks, voice thick with sleep.

And it is like that, every morning, how Nino wakes up.


End file.
